DACA Decision: We Finally Found a Judge Who Knows His Role

You could knock us over with a feather. Coming hot on the heels of a federal court ruling that struck down California’s environmental challenge against the Trump administration’s border wall, a district court judge in Maryland has done the same with a challenge to Trump’s decision to end DACA.

In his ruling Monday, Judge Roger Titus proved that he is apparently one of the few judges left in this country who actually understands that he is not sitting on the bench to be part of “the resistance,” give the liberal media something to cheer about, or appoint himself the de facto President of the United States. If only the idiots sitting on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals would take a lesson.

“This decision took control of a pell-mell situation and provided Congress – the branch of government charged with determining immigration policy – an opportunity to remedy it,” wrote Titus. “Given the reasonable belief that DACA was unlawful, the decision to wind down DACA in an orderly manner was rational.”

Titus made it clear in his ruling that he was not in favor of seeing Dreamers lose their legal protections and was not necessarily happy with the potential result of his own judgement. However, he understood that it was not his role to act as a substitute for the legislature.

Furthermore, he said that critics calling on him to review Trump’s tweets on the subject as an avenue towards determining the legality of ending DACA were mistaken.

“As disheartening or inappropriate as the president’s occasionally disparaging remarks may be, they are not relevant to the larger issues governing the DACA rescission,” he wrote. “The DACA Rescission Memo is clear as to its purpose and reasoning, and its decision is rationally supported by the administrative record.”

This is so sensible and fair that it’s almost hard to believe it came from the pen of a federal judge. Call us cynical, but we were beginning to think that the judiciary was filled with nothing but partisan hacks who hadn’t cracked a law book in thirty years. It’s heartening to know that isn’t the case, at least not entirely.

The idea that Trump could not UNDO an executive order that Obama wrote has always been absolutely absurd. How could it possibly be legal for Obama to grant legal protections for illegal immigrants and NOT LEGAL for Trump to rescind them? It makes no sense whatsoever, especially given the fact that Trump specifically called on Congress to pass a law affirming those protections through legislation. That the Democrats have been unwilling to negotiate a deal for the Dreamers is certainly not the fault of the president. They’re playing political games while hundreds of thousands of people are waiting to learn their fate.

Titus’ ruling does not lift the earlier injunctions in place against the rescission order, but the federal court conflict may make it more likely that the Supreme Court will review this case somewhere down the line.